When I saw this headline I couldn’t help but wonder if this might be related to that blackmail thing back in March… but sadly from how not-comprehensive it is, it clearly isn’t.
Only Turing (their microarchitecture introduced in late 2018) and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver, because it uses their new new “GPU System Processor (GSP)” architecture which involves loading binary firmware (which they aren’t opening the source for) on the GPU at runtime.
NVIDIA’s user-space libraries and OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenCL / CUDA drivers remain closed-source.
Having the kernel module be open source (and maybe one day accepted in mainline) will certainly make life easier for some people (especially nvidia engineers), but from the security, privacy, and philosophical standpoints, this doesn’t really change much.
When I saw this headline I couldn’t help but wonder if this might be related to that blackmail thing back in March… but sadly from how not-comprehensive it is, it clearly isn’t.
Only Turing (their microarchitecture introduced in late 2018) and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver, because it uses their new new “GPU System Processor (GSP)” architecture which involves loading binary firmware (which they aren’t opening the source for) on the GPU at runtime.
NVIDIA’s user-space libraries and OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenCL / CUDA drivers remain closed-source.
Having the kernel module be open source (and maybe one day accepted in mainline) will certainly make life easier for some people (especially nvidia engineers), but from the security, privacy, and philosophical standpoints, this doesn’t really change much.
so,
🖕 Nvidia
(still)